User Activity Monitoring Software

Resources

• Reporting
• LANGuardian architecture
• Online demo

 

User activity monitoring

LANGuardian gives network managers a one-page view of all network activity associated with a user.

Users interact with the network in many different ways during the average day. They visit websites, open and close files on file shares, send and receive email, interact with line-of-business applications and databases, download files from the Internet, upload photos and videos to sites such as Flickr and YouTube, perform online backups, and more. They can also – usually unwittingly – expose the network and themselves to intrusions, malware, viruses, spambots, spybots, viruses, phishing attacks, and other security risks.

With LANGuardian, you can see on a single dashboard a summary of all network activity associated with an individual user. From this starting point, you can drill down to more details on each type of activity. The user dashboard is an indispensable aid to network troubleshooting because most problems are reported by individual users, and the dashboard gives the network manager and helpdesk staff a summary of network activity from the point of view of the user who reported the problem.

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The user dashboard gives you a consolidated view of user activity that helps you to detect and investigate many different situations, including:

• Access to Windows file shares
• Transactions involving SQL Server databases
• Data leakage – files transferred outside the network
• Files downloaded from the Internet
• Use of specific ports and protocols
• Use of a proxy server to gain access to prohibited websites

The user dashboard is also invaluable in a more general troubleshooting and monitoring context. For example, if you view a LANGuardian bandwidth usage report and notice that a user is consuming a disproportionately large amount of bandwidth, you can switch to the user dashboard and see a summary of that user's network activity. From the user dashboard, you can drill down into details and identify the cause of the user's high bandwidth consumption.

You can also use LANGuardian to investigate and report on past activity by users. The LANGuardian database stores months (somtimes years, depending on the traffic volume and amount of disk space available) of historical traffic data. You can use this data for advanced forensic analysis, creating audit trails, and troubleshooting problems that manifest themselves over a long period of time.

Searching by IP address

The user dashboard is powered by the built-in search engine that allows you to search the LANGuardian traffic database for all activity involving the specified user. As well as searching by user, you can also search by IP address to see a summary page of all activity associated with that address.

The following table shows the reports that are available on the user and IP summary dashboards.

Find out more

If you have any questions about how LANGuardian can help you with your network monitoring requirements, please contact us. If you would like to see LANGuardian in action, please try our online demo system or download a free 30-day trial to try it on your own network with your own data.